


The Kids are Alright

by SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: The Kids Are Alright [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Barbara Gordon is Oracle, Cassandra Cain is Talon, Crime Fighting, Damian Wayne is Batman, Damian Wayne is Robin, Dick Grayson is Catlad, F/F, Families of Choice, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Harper Row is Robin, Jason Todd is Red Hood, M/M, Multi, Notfic, Secret Identity, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Supervillains, Tim Drake is an actual supervillain, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 20:01:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5304950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>aka my epic Batkid AU not!fic of Doom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kids are Alright

**Author's Note:**

> There's so much about this universe I didn't put in for the sake of the wordcount. One day I think I'll turn it into an actual fic, but for now have a 3,600 word plot outline, lol.
> 
> Oh, and assuming google translate didn't lie too badly, Tia Pregunta meants Auntie Question.

What if Damian where older? Conceived at the beginning of Bruce’s career as Batman, maybe even when he’s training.

He appears before the Graysons fall to their deaths, and Bruce doesn’t go to the circus that night, because he’s busy training Damian to be something other than a killer.

Bruce Wayne doesn’t take Dick in, but he’s still an orphan, in shock and in need of a home.But someone else is there for him.

Selina Kyle is watching in the audience, and she doesn’t feel any sudden identification with the boy, she just sees potential. Someone with gymnastic skills she’s never seen in a child before. Someone with the potential to be the best thief ever.

So she takes Dick in, raises him. They have a few moral disagreements, but Dick doesn’t have any objections to taking from the wealthy and corrupt and Selina doesn’t mind curbing her more violent instincts, at least when Dick’s around. He’s Catlad until he’s only enough to realise quite how terrible a name that is, and then he’s Feline.

Damian doesn’t get fired, or leave, because he’s Bruce’s blood and that means something to him, so even when he graduates to Nightwing, he stays in Gotham.

And so Bruce isn’t alone the night he parks in Crime Alley, and Jason isn’t stupid enough to risk starting anything with someone as terrifying as Nightwing.

He finds another car, and it’s not the Batmobile, but it’s got a whole lot of weapons, and he’s not so stupid he doesn’t know that the cans of laughing gas and the lipstick in the car mean, but nor is he stupid enough to turn down the chance of a gun of his own, so he takes one.

Joker is bored, and he doesn’t like Nightwing and he hates that Batman has a sidekick, so when the person who took his favourite .22 (small enough for a child, and that coupled with the size of the fingerprints had clued him in straight away about what kind of person they were looking for) is a kid, he decides he’s going to recruit them as a minion.

But Harley feels sorry for the kid, and adopts him as a kind of baby brother, and next thing Joker knows he’s basically got a kid, and sometimes it’s irritating, but mostly it’s fascinating and a chance to play all sorts of fun mind games. (He totally gets now why Batsy likes having a kid around).

Eventually Jason gets old enough to really fight back, and the game isn’t fun anymore, so Joker beats him almost to death (some even say all the way to death, but Jason isn’t talking so no-one’s sure) and leaves him for the cops. He spends the next five years being shipped between Arkham and Blackgate before his lawyer finally persuades the court that he wasn’t culpable due to being a minor. He’s released, but the damage has already been done. He gets some training, and a mask (one designed to enrage his adoptive father) and sets out to carve his own territory.

Cassandra Cain refuses her father for the first time when she’s a child. She begins thinking of running away, going somewhere where she doesn’t have to kill, but it’s already too late. He’s made some deals, found people who want a killer child. The court of owls is always looking for new ways to improve on the talon programme, and the one thing they haven’t tried for centuries is a living assassin. They buy Cassie from her father; leave her to be raised by the undead Talons and the scientists who make them, shaped into something deadly and ruthless.

The one thing they never really manage, despite all kinds of interesting experiments, is the destruction of her free will.

Tim Drake gets his hug from Dick, like he does in all the best universes, and then he watches Dick’s parents die, watches Dick crumble as his world collapses. He watches the fall too, and manages to get quite close to the bodies before his parents remember they’re supposed to actually look after him.

He never forgets the hug, or the sound of breaking bones and screams, or the smell of blood. When Selina’s apprentice makes his debut, Tim recognises the way he moves instantly. He begins sneaking out, trying to catch glimpses of the two of them, and he sees the city in a way he never has before, and the thing that keeps springing to mind when he films Dick or Scarecrow or Joker or Joker’s big grinning maniac of a son, is that the current system is messy. And exploitable. And he starts dreaming of being like Dick, of taking what he wants, but when he wants is much bigger and more complex than any of Dick’s jewels.

He wants Gotham. He wants the chance to make things better, ordered, calm.

He knows he’ll need some new skills to get it, so when he’ll twelve, he runs away from home and takes the name Protégé and goes to the Riddler and begs to be taken as his apprentice. And Eddie is exactly vain enough to be flattered, and he agrees. It only lasts a few months before he throws the kid out, but that’s enough, by then Tim has learnt enough to be ready to approach Scarecrow. And then the Joker.

It’s while he’s with Joker that Jason comes back. He doesn’t react well to seeing another child in Joker’s colours, ambushes the kid and slits his throat, but Harley is a damn good field medic and he gets him stitched up enough to get him to an actual hospital. It’s touch and go (for his life and his secret identity) but he survives and only a few weeks later he’s recovered enough to do some ambushing of his own. With a crowbar.

Jason is exactly messed up enough to be willing to try and make friends after that, and it doesn’t take long before they’re Red Hood and Protégé, TimandJason, an inseparable unit.

They leave the Joker behind, and Tim finds himself a new apprenticeship, this time with the Penguin, learning the tides of Gotham’s organised crime.

Babs makes her own Batsuit, and batarangs, but this Batman hasn’t had Dick to beat him into submission, so instead of training and grudging support and a second family, Babs gets taken to see her father.

Her dad decides she needs time away from Gotham, so he packs her off to stay with her mother, just in time for James Junior’s final breakdown, killing spree and arrest.

She hasn’t had her months on the streets to teach her paranoia and mistrust, and so she doesn’t listen to her instincts, doesn’t run far and fast like she wants to. She tries to help, and when he takes her hostage, she doesn’t fight back with everything she’s got. James ends up in jail. Barbara ends up in a wheelchair, the bullet her brother put in her still lodged in her spine.

She moves back to Gotham, becomes Oracle, teachers herself how to fight back in ways that don’t need her legs to work, recuits a team of women to do the things Batman can't, or won't.

Stephanie Brown doesn’t have Red Robin to help her out, and her training when it finally comes is from the birds, not the bats. She’s still Spoiler, but she uses a crossbow given to her by Huntress, and kicks taught to her by Black Canary and stealth learnt from Lady Shiva. Her punches are all her own, because whoever her teachers are, Steph will always be a bruiser.

 

* * *

 

 

When Dick first starts going out to a bar every Tuesday, it’s just a chance for a bit of space. He’s not expecting Oracle to start joining him, but Selina works with the Birds often enough that he knows not to try and refuse her.

And then she starts bringing Steph, because the girl could use some down time, and Steph bring Tim (Spoiler and Protégé had fought, back when Tim was working with the Mad Hatter, but the fight had quickly degenerated into the two of them throwing cobblestones and increasingly childish insults, and ended with Tim with a bump the size of an egg on his head laughing harder than he’d even known he was capable of and Steph torn between fucking him and adopting him).

Tim brings Jason, because they never do anything alone for very long, and then Talon is sent to kill Feline, and Dick, realising he’s totally outclassed, offers her a drink. She takes it, and it’s only much later he finds out what it had cost her to save his life.

She doesn’t seem to mind though, and the two of them are quickly firm friends, because Dick’s first language will always be his body, and he and Cass understand one another perfectly. Steph coos over her, and Oracle watches her thoughtfully and a week later she’s officially a Bird. She’s their Black Swan, and she quickly finds herself with a whole host of protective older sisters to look out for her and threaten Feline when they think he’s not being nice enough to her.

(Protégé and Black Swan hate one another, because Protégé doesn’t even bother to try and stop lying and Black Swan hates the complex layers of meaning inherent in his every gesture, but Tim and Cass are, admittedly distant, friends, if only because Dick is not above just locking them in a room together until they agree to get along or one of them dies.)

The first time Damian joins them, Protégé disappears, Jason punches him, Steph cheers Jason on and Oracle throws her drink at him.

The next week Tim turns up in disguise, Cass brings two extra knives and Steph her best crossbow and Oracle has her escrima sticks slotted into their sheaf on her chair. Jason nearly doesn’t come at all, but her likes Tim’s waitress costume, so he begrudgingly tags along.

This time it’s Steph who throws the first punch, but after Damian catches it and complements her on her technique things are much less tense.

 

* * *

 

 

Damian isn’t sure what he’s doing here, drinking with these criminal, mostly underage, kids. He just knows he needs something that isn’t just him and his father alone in the cave. He loves his father, but he needs a break, and he needs to learn how to talk to people his own age before the Titans falls apart before it’s really had a chance to begin, and he needs to relax for a change.

(And spend some more time around Feline, because maybe if he gets comfortable enough around him he’ll stop getting hard every time they fight).

Gradually he finds he’s genuinely enjoying evenings with them, getting to know them, learning and teaching. He learns how to be someone new without losing himself from Tim, he learns about remaking himself from Oracle, he learns how to have fun from Steph, how to find joy in the moment from Cass, how to let grudges go from Jason. He learns how to give comfort from Dick. He learns how to have friends from all of them.

He doesn’t bring his problems with Batman to them, they’re too close, but he offers them the Titans, takes their advice and encouragement and suggestions and tactics, and uses them to forge a team, a second group of friends who he can talk to about Bruce. And he braces himself for jealousy, or rejection, but Dick laughs and tells him no, that’s not how friendship works, they’re glad he has his team, they want him to be happy with or without them, and that’s the first time Damian kisses Dick.

(Nightwing had kisses Feline once, long ago, but Steph had taught him why that didn’t exactly count, why some things need to be done with masks. And then Tim had taught him some very educational things about the fun that can be had with masks on, and about how that has to come second.)

Tim begins talking about moving on, leaving the city to continue his education. Jason freaks when Tim starts talking about joining the League of Assassins, and while Damian does his best to dissuade him, he’s also the one who talks Jason down from his freak-out. His mother and grandfather aren’t going to try and hurt Tim, they’re going to adore him, which comes with its own problems, but at least he convinces Jason that Tim isn’t going to his death.

 

Tim leaves and Jason only goes on two rampages, which is five less than Batman and Nightwing had been planning for, and things mostly settle down until the day Bruce doesn’t come back from a mission.

Damian searches, and panics, and cries on Dick’s shoulder (Dick has excellent shoulders for crying on, strong and warm and always welcoming) and eventually he puts on the Batsuit.

He hates it, and it’s unbearably lonely, but he has his friends, and Aunt Kate, and the woman he will always think of as Tía Pregunta, and the newly costumed Flamebird, and somehow he manages long enough for Jason to come back from wherever it was he’d vanished too after Bruce died, dragging a very shamefaced Batman with him.

Jason doesn’t like parents who disappear on their kids, and he doesn’t like doing nothing but missing Tim, and he doesn’t like that Arsenal thinks he’s a bad guy (Arsenal is cute and funny and kinky as hell and Jason has plans to steal him away from Feline, because how are they even friends anyway? Feline is a bad guy. At least Jason is a vigilante, even if he is a murderous one). So he’d gone to Jason Blood, the most powerful magician he knows of who isn’t either a supervillain or a member of JLA. And Jason is old enough and creepy enough and Gothamite enough that he has a vial of Bruce Wayne’s blood, and he knew where to find him, even if the where turned out to be more of a when, and Jason told himself he absolutely wasn’t doing this for Damian and walked into the portal.

Bruce takes back the cowl, and Damian sighs with relief and puts on the Nightwing armour again, and goes to talk to Flamebird about the possibility of a more permanent team up, since Batwoman isn’t really the sidekick type.

Arsenal is impressed enough that he actually introduces Jason to Starfire, and the threesomes (and foursomes when Dick’s around) are enough to make him almost stop missing Tim like a limb.

And then Tim reappears with a terrifying array of knives, a new codename and a toddler who looks too much like Bruce for anyone to deny just what experiments Talia has been running.

The child is called Tariq, Conqueror, but it quickly gets shortened to Tari, and then to Terry. He’s curious and cheerful and fiercely intelligent with a tendency to speak in a garbled mix of the different languages he knows, mostly Arabic, Japanese and English.

Tim, the Spider now, offers his skills to Oracle, and even knowing that this will be the last of his apprenticeships, that any day could be the day he begins to take over and she has to put him down, she agrees.

Tim begins reintegrating himself into Jason and Steph’s lives, rebuilding relationships damaged by time and distance. He doesn’t bother getting any kind of home of his own beyond the hidden rooms he uses as equipment caches, but he has clothes at Steph's and Jason’s and Dick’s and the Clock tower and Damian will stop asking Alfred to stock Zesti just as soon as he figures out a) how and when Tim figured out his identity and b) how the hell he’s even getting into the manor.

Damian persuades Bruce that it’s time to air out the Robin suit, now that Damian has a sidekick of his own, and it’ll be a decade before Terry can begin wearing it. When Lucius Fox’s eldest daughter Tamara becomes addicted to a street version of Venom, Bruce gets to see her little brother up close and decides to offer him the title of Robin.

Luke refuses the black and red, designing himself something a lot more colourful.

Tam gets addiction support, enhanced strength and a place on the birds as Foxy, a codename she loves as much as everyone else hates it.

Lucius Fox utterly despairs of his children, but at the same time he’s so proud of all of them, and when little Tiffany starts talking about being a vigilante when she grows up he doesn’t even yell at her. Just sets about finding a real job she’ll love enough to give up her dreams of joining her siblings on the street.

Lex Luthor clones Superman and Tim is fascinated. Jason is volunteered to be the one to explain to the kid that stalking is Tim’s way of saying he wants to be friends, and it actually goes quite well until the day Clark turns up in the cave holding Tim by the back of his suit to demand Bruce control his supervillains better because he’d found all the bugs Tim left in Kon’s room. (Later Tim tells Damian proudly that he’s only actually found half the bugs.) And Bruce has to explain, as best he can, that the somewhat deranged trained Assassin who’s stalking Clarks sort-of-son is also Bruce’s son’s friend, and doesn’t mean Kon any harm.

And Kon is fascinated enough by anyone who can make Clark that angry, and who can beat his supersenses, that he starts visiting Tim until Tim is forced to admit he doesn’t want to kill Kon in his sleep (which Kon has learnt is Tim for wanting to be friends). And Kon introduces him to his girlfriend, and Impulse and Beast Boy and Bunker and Tim introduces them to Damian and next thing they know they’re being forcibly recruited to the Teen Titans.

Jason kills Black Mask, and takes his territory and sets about really running things, managing his territory in a way he’d never had the patience for as a teenager.

Cass and Steph get a flat share, and then a girl with homemade tech and blue hair literally lands on Steph when she’s out one night, and Steph takes her home and lets her pass out on the sofa, and when she wakes up she yells at her a bit, hits her gently in one of the non bruised areas, and drags her Oracle, who makes Tim to drag her to the Cave, because some people are birds and some are bats and Harper Row is definitely the latter.

Bruce gives her an hour long lecture and a crash course in jujitsu tells her to be back for more of the same the next night.

No one knows quite what to do with her, but Bruce is determined to train her, and Steph and Cass have adopted her, and by the time Bruce declares her street ready (but which point Harper is just about ready to kill someone from the frustration of being benched) Luke declares himself too old to be Robin. He takes the identity of Batwing with him when he goes travelling, seeking out the vigilantes around the world who have been inspired by Bruce and training and learning from them.

Harper puts on the red and yellow, declares it hideous and takes Damian’s old Red and Black instead.

Terry begins training, nothing strenuous yet, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’ll end up on the streets one day, and Harper is already calling him Robin Jr.

Dick and Damian finally, after six years, admit they’ve been fucking like bunnies for years (and have been in love for even longer) and get an apartment together.

Dick’s only there about half the time, because cats cannot be owned, and Damian takes most of the stuff he attempts to decorate the place with straight to the police to be ID’d and returned to the rightful owners and they fight so badly Cass actually has to lock them in their bedroom together before they’ll try and make up, but they do, and the superhero and villain community for once find themselves in total agreement that they’re terrifyingly adorable. (As opposed to Jason and Tim who are just terrifying. Steph has been known to actually pay them not to talk about their sex life in front of her).

And they’re all happy. Dick has an awesome creepy boyfriend who adores him and only occasionally arrests him and all the friends he could want. Jason has a home and people who rely on him and Tim and also some less terrifying lovers for when he needs a break. Tim has people who love him despite his being a murdering almost-sociopath, and not even Oracle has noticed him making the first moves in his long game, and sometimes he goes on missions with actual superhero teams which is hilarious and always entertaining. Steph has the world’s most dangerous flatshare and official approval from the Bats and the Birds. Cass has the family she didn’t know she was waiting for. Babs has access to every secure database in the world and agents she trusts completely and a ridiculous violent broken second family who she loves. And Damian has more brothers and sisters than he ever wanted and more friends than he ever knew he needed, and the independence and trust he’d been fighting for since he was a child.

And Terry has a stuffed Bat called Alfred.

**Author's Note:**

> What do you guys like/not like about this? Does it line up with your own metas? Would you read a fic set in this world? All these questions an more can be answers in the comments.


End file.
